Questions about routing with multiple routers

Z

Zygomatic

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 6, 2006
Messages
81
In my Home network I have several routers, although my main router/firewall is an ipcop machine. I noticed after upgrading some of my wireless routers ( I have 3...) to DD-WRT I have the option to disable routing. I'm wondering if this will mean that IPCOP will do all the routing throughout the network. I would assume that going through 3 routers, all with routing enabled would affect latency. If anyone has any good links to information on this topic please post them, I haven't been able to find much info on google so far.

I'll give you an example so you can see how my network is laid out between the internet and my computers in my workshop.

<-------------------------------House-------------------------------><----------------------Shed--------------------------->
Comcast ---> IPCOP ---> TP-Link TL-WDR3600 ---> 8p Gig Switch ---> Procurve 2650 ---> PC

This example is an extreme case but I am limited on Gbit ports so I end up with lots of network devices between here and there. There isn't an extraordinary number of computers on my network as I imagine the answer would be different if I was laying out a huge network. Every device is on the same subnet (.5), and ip addresses are forwarded by the DD-WRT routers.
 
What are the routers used for? Basic switches and APs? If they ate all on the same subnet, you don't need routing at all.
 
/usr/home said:
What are the routers used for? Basic switches and APs? If they ate all on the same subnet, you don't need routing at all.
Click to expand...

yes they all eat ;) on the same subnet. So basically routing is only necessary when using multiple subnets?
 
Disable DHCP on your router/APs and move the cable currently in your WAN port to a LAN port on each router/AP.
You may want to set a static IP address on the LAN side of the router/APs in order to find and admin them.
Routers separate broadcast domains. If you don't know what that means, you definitely want as few routers as possible between your devices and your modem.
 
Zygomatic said:
II noticed after upgrading some of my wireless routers ( I have 3...) to DD-WRT I have the option to disable routing. I'm wondering if this will mean that IPCOP will do all the routing throughout the network.
Click to expand...

Technically, the IPCOP machine is not concerned with what everyone else is doing among each other on the network. Its only job is to route traffic that leaves the network. If it drops out of the network, the rest can still talk to each other. This might seem pedantic but it seems to be common these days that basic networking is completely misunderstood.

If you disable routing, you just have a large Layer2 segment which is all you need in that setup.
 
I have since gone through and reconfigured all devices on the network, DD-WRT confused me a little bit but I finally figured it out. I had DHCP forwarding on (Which didn't have any clients anways) and needed to select DHCP server before it gave me an option to disable it. I also disabled routing on all the devices beyond IPCOP. Also I had to disable the WAN port before it gave me the option to "Assign WAN Port to Switch", which sounds like what I wanted. I'm not sure if I was really bottlenecking myself in any way, I just wanted to know the correct way to set all this up. Thanks for the help!
 
Zygomatic said:
I'm not sure if I was really bottlenecking myself in any way, I just wanted to know the correct way to set all this up. Thanks for the help!
Click to expand...

Technically yes, realistically no, experientially it depends. The biggest issue was not being able to access resources across your home network if you wanted to.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top